In an existing communication network, applications of Access Server (AS) have become wide increasingly. The AS is typically located at a convergence layer of the communication network and is primarily adapted to perform communication management including access management for a user device and a network device. There are various types of access servers such as a Broadband Access Server (BTAS) which is primarily applied in a broadband communication network. The user device typically refers to a communication device with which an ordinary network user has an access to the communication network, such as a Personal Computer (PC) and a notebook computer. The network device typically refers to a communication device provided by a network operator or a network service provider, located at an access layer of the communication network and adapted to support an access of the user device to the communication network, such as a Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAM), a Local Area Network Switch (LAN Switch), an Access Point (AP) and a Cable Modem Terminal System (CMTS).
When the network device and the user device request for accessing a core layer of the communication network, the AS needs to perform access management for the network device and the user device so that the network device and the user device can access the core layer successfully. In a commonly used access management method, the AS regards any communication device issuing a service request as a user equipment and configures the communication device issuing the service request with communication parameters such as an Access Control List (ACL), a Quality of Service (QoS), an authentication policy and a billing policy.
However the network device is intended to support the user device accessing the communication network and is typically not configured with communication parameters such as an authentication policy and a billing policy, and therefore a human operator needs to perform second maintenance or modification of the communication parameters of the network device configured by the AS so as to disable or cancel the communication parameters unnecessary to be configured for the network device. This causes the human operator to perform second maintenance or modification of the communication parameters for numerous network devices and thus reduces greatly the speed of an access of the network device to the communication network. Further excessive second maintenance or modification operations tend to cause operation errors and hence affect normal communication of the network device and finally affect normal communication of the user device and lower user satisfaction.
A more important problem lies in that the AS needs to allocate a user Connectivity Information Block (CIB) table to each communication device for storing the configured communication parameters after configuring the communication parameters for respective network devices or user devices. Because the CIB table usually stores numerous communication parameters which occupy a large amount of memory space in the AS, the number of CIB tables allocated and stored by the AS is very limited, which may result in that the AS can only support a limited number of communication devices accessing the communication network,